Continued advances in semiconductor miniaturization technologies have resulted in various commercially viable portable products. For example, universal serial bus (USB) flash drives provide portable storage capacities of 1 GB or more for use with USB-equipped personal computers. Various media storage devices, such as Memory Stick, CompactFlash, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and Microdrive flash memories, are available for extending the capacities of any of a number of multimedia devices, such as digital photography equipment, gaming systems, audio players, and the like.
The portable computing marketplace has evolved from the variety of portable devices available for use with personal computing technologies. One example of a popular portable computing device is the Computer-On-a-Stick™ (COS) produced by Bionopoly LLC of Mountain View, Calif. The COS is a USB Flash Drive that features an onboard Operating System, a Microsoft Office™-compatible suite, PDF™ Creator, and various other computing applications including web browser, email and messaging utilities. In operation, the COS is booted from the host USB drive thereby bypassing the host operating system.
As portable media and computational devices become more common, computing environments that may host such devices have a corresponding increase in computational resources or capabilities that may be added, removed, and interchanged with other systems. When a variety of portable computing devices are periodically added or removed from a computing system, the host desktop is necessarily modified with the addition or removal of such devices. In such a situation, efficient allocation of system resources to computing entities is complicated by the fact that the available computing devices are dynamic by nature due to the portability of such devices. As the complexity of computing system infrastructure continues to increase, the efficient allocation of system resources to computing system devices becomes increasingly difficult.